


What happened was...

by nykvos



Category: The Avengers (Marvel Movies), Thor (Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Time Travel, M/M, Universe Travel, adding more tags as we go and more characters are introduced
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-03-03
Updated: 2019-03-12
Packaged: 2019-11-08 13:21:18
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,208
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17982092
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nykvos/pseuds/nykvos
Summary: He fell and he thought that was the end of it. Yet somehow something happened, somehow he was saved. Saved by a band of unlikely vaguely humanoid looking group calling themselves the Guardians of The Galaxy.Unknowing to Loki, still fresh from the fall from the Bifrost and now on the run, there was a Thor searching him out.(A Time and Universe Travel fic of 2011 Loki and IW Thor)





	1. Well You See What Happened Was. . .

He fell.

Not much a beginning, is it?

Fell and didn’t fall at all. Really, after so long the fall felt like nothing at all. There wasn’t anything, no wind, no sense, just the ever stillness of the stars around getting neither closer or farther. It could’ve been a picture and, in the least lucidity in his mind, he would believe it. Though, when he’d reach out and try to touch the paper and painted skin, not even air would ribbon through his fingers, only

space.

If it weren’t for the lingering heat of the saber still clinging to his palm—a helpless reminding warmth that anchored his thoughts back to reality—he could have easily just

forget.

And perhaps that was the easier option because what was really left? Here he was, falling between worlds and between nothing at all. He falls for his death but slowly it comes. Even if he is a god, his lungs still ache for air, his eyes for light, his skin for feeling. He is dying. Soon enough, he’ll become another constellation to tinkle down some world, with a story untold.

Of course, in a sort of indigent of it all, the Norns had _other_ ideas.

* * *

 

WELL YOU SEE WHAT HAPPENED WAS………

* * *

 

“Oh, _gro-oss!_ ”

“Quick, wipe it off-!”

“Eurgh, is it dead? It’s dead right?”

“I am Groot.”

“Groot, _no_ , we are _not_ doing that.”

“I am Groot…”

Peter Quill, Starlord extraordinaire, Guardian, and Captain of the ship the _Milano_ , pulls a nasty face at the being that had and is currently smacking face with the windshield of his prized vessel. “Turning on the wipers,” he announces and does. They smack a few times against the body.

“Hey dumbass, it’s not working,” Rocket said, which Peter response with a _Hey_ and a quick click off _off-on_ , which only achieves the same result.

Gamora groans. “Stop acting like children. Peter go out there and push it off.”

“What?! Why me?”

Rocket cuts in with a grin, “Be- _cause_ , Lover-Boy, you-”

“Comrades!” Drax shouts. The group follows his extended pointed finger to see the body outside shifting and sees two opened eyes staring right at them. “It lives!”

Then it’s a scramble to bring him inside.

-

They bring him in (Peter, though severely apprehensive, was the one to do it) and settle him in one of the metal tables located in the back of the ship. They all gather around him, watching to see if he’ll move again.

He doesn’t.

“Is he dead?” asks Mantis, peering down at his face. It was slack, pale, his eyes closed from deep sleep. He doesn’t move.

Gamora touches his shoulder, sliding her hand to his neck and waits. “I don’t think so…Just…sleeping.” She then wrinkles her brows, letting her hand linger before pulling it away. “He’s not from around here.”

“Yeah, no shit,” Rocket helpfully includes, which earns him an eyeroll.

“What I _meant_ ,” Gamora says, sourly, “was that his physiology is…different.”

“What does _that_ mean?” Peter asks quickly, which can be assume not for the person itself but the fact Gamora had said it. He eyes the man on the table. “He looks pretty scrawny to me.”

“Yes, pretty and scrawny!” Drax said.

“No—What— _pretty_ _scrawny_ —there’s no _and_ , just—It’s just those two words, man!”

Mantis adds in, “but he is pretty.”

Peter groans, “sure, fine, whatever. But he’s still scrawny.”

“Actually,” Gamora says, “He’s probably got more muscle than you.”

Peter throws his hands up in defeat.

“Y’all done arguing? Pretty boy’s awake.”

They all turn to the man at the table. Oh. Well, will you look at that.

The man blinks many times, like he was trying to focus sight back into his eyes, and slowly, slowly raises himself up to a sitting position but struggles with just that. Mantis tries to swoop in to help but Gamora keeps her back. The man finally notices them and, like time had suddenly slowed down by ten, an array of emotion flash across his face and steadily lands on _panic_ and _fight_.

Before they know it, the man is on his feet with a wide eyed look and a dagger in his hands. “Where am I?”

“Woah, woah, woah. Calm down, buddy.” Peter had put his hands up when the man pulled the dagger out. The man squints at him, analyzing him, like he was debating in his mind which way was the best way to skewer and serve him with. Peter didn’t like it one bit. “You’re safe,” he tries to placate, “no ones’ here to hurt you.” The man seems to be taking that in, his eyes glancing between Peter and the rest of the guardians as if to gauge them and the validity of Peter’s words.

“Can you tell us your name?” Gamora asks. “Where you’re from?”

The man doesn’t answer for a long moment, probably weighing in his head whether or not to let them privy to such information, before he ultimately decides. “Loki is my name.” It is all he says.

Peter glances to Gamora to have her keep talking. Gamora narrows her eyes at him but otherwise does so. “Alright…Loki. Why don’t you put the knife down, okay? We can start over without anyone threatening each other.”

Loki thinks about it. “I rather keep it actually,” he said.

There’s a shared groan.

“Let’s just throw him out,” says Rocket. “Let him be someone else’s problem.”

“We’re _not_ doing that,” Gamora scorns.

Rocket shrugs, “What? He’ll live. Probably.” Groot seconds that with an appropriate grootish response.

Loki wrinkles his nose, “What?”

“I thought I was clear, I sa-aid—”

“No, not you,” Loki said to Rocket. He’s lowering his dagger now, relaxing his stance. Peter takes it as a good sign. “Him, the tree being. What did you say?”

Groot slowly repeats what he said, with a slight inflection at the end like he wasn’t sure what he said himself.

“Ah. I see.”

There’s a collective response to that:

“ _What?_ ”

Loki gives them a steady surveying stare. “What?”

“You understand—“ Peter begins to say but Gamora grips his arm tightly and whispers ‘ _not now_ ’ harshly into his ear (which Peter is kind of into but refuses to say aloud). “You know what? Never mind. You’re not gunna try to stab us now, right?”

“Only if the moment entails.”

Well, it’s a start. Loki had even put the dagger away.

“Cool,” Peter said. “Cool, cool, cool.” Peter puts a hand on his chest, “Anyways, I’m—DUDE!?”

Loki had passed out. Drax had been the one to catch him before he hit the floor. “Gah, this one’s heavier than he looks,” Drax said, slowly lifting him back up. Mantis rushes to his side and brushes her hand against Loki’s forehead as if she was checking his temperature.

“He’s…exhausted,” She says quietly, then turns to them. She’s blinking rapidly, like she was trying to keep from crying. “He’s hurt, very hurt. Deep inside, like his heart had broken.” She pulls her hand away like she can’t bear to feel it any longer and perhaps she really can’t. “He’s in so much pain…”

Drax manages to set him back on the metal table.

They decide to let him rest and continue onward.

Back in the ship’s piloting bridge, Gamora is the one to break the silence. “It’s odd, isn’t it?” She said. “That he falls in while that huge burst of energy happened?”

“Think they’re connected?”

Gamora nods. “That energy blast nearly shut down our entire system, but there’s nothing that could’ve created it. Not to that magnitude.”

Peter leans back in his captain’s chair. They had been cruising the past few hours while suddenly all their alarms began blaring. It was something the [Milano] has never done before. It had completely locked them out of the controls, the piloting utterly unresponsive, and left to watch as the gauges and screens flux and flickered wildly until Rocket managed to somehow bypass and redirect the energy and stop a complete system overload. Then Loki hit their windshield.

_Could_ they be connected? 

Peter can’t think on it now.

-

(Years ago, the broken Bifrost, space stretches everywhere and nowhere. One Thor out of many stands at the broken edge, wondering and hoping.

Years later, the voyaging Ark, space stretches everywhere and nowhere. One Loki out of many stands at the bridge’s end, eyes narrowed out onto space.

How odd.)

-

Loki, it turns out, is a heavy sleeper.

“You know, I’d be more worried if the guy died in his sleep,” Rocket said.

He sleeps for a time and none of them have any idea what to do with him. Taking turns, they keep watch to see when he’ll wake up. A day turns into two, then three, and soon Peter grumbles as he takes a seat besides the metal table and Drax only offers a shrug to his distress.

He sighs. “Just where did you come from?”

There’s not an answer.

As if Peter expected there to be one. So he leans back and slouches, turning his eyes to the ceiling.

Loki sleeps.

-

At some point in the night Mantis had come by, settling herself down across from him.

Peter looks at her with bleary eyes, blinking and yawning. “’is not your shift yet,” he says slowly, trying to work the words out because he most definingly didn’t fall asleep on the job, nope. She doesn’t reply, instead looking to the sleeping compatriot. “Mantis, you okay?”

“He’s not in peace,” she says softly.

Ah.

Peter straightens himself in his seat, his muscles straining a bit from their long-held position. “We’ll figure it out,” he said. “We’ll be able to help him.”

Mantis looks comforted by his words. Her hand hovers over Loki’s arm before touching him with a brush over her fingertips. Peter watches in quiet awe as she closes her eyes and concentrates on what she’s doing. Soon enough, a faint pink glow emits from her hand and then Peter hears a low sigh, Mantis pulls her hand away. “There,” she said simply.

Peter peers over. Loki looks at peace as he sleeps on.

-

He wakes up.

Drax had been the one to race to the rest of the team and announce it.

He then steals one of the escape pods.

Drax announces that too.

“What the fuck!”

-

The guy had some nerve honestly. Like, who _does_ that? They pick him up, save his ass from being space frozen, let him sleep and stay aboard their ship, and then he has the nerve to drive off without so much of a thank you! Why he ought’a—

“Peter, shut up.”

Peter grumbles, “It’s still shitty.”

Rocket snorts, “Yeah, well, complain about it some other time because—“ his claw taps on the screen in front of him “—we got ourselves a distress signal.”


	2. It’s Here, There, or Knowhere

He dreamt. 

He isn’t sure for how long, but he dreamt. Of all of it. Of Thor, of the Casket, of the pandora of his heritage; of the helpless ugly feelings of betrayal that drowned him from its memory, intensified from its dreamscape. He wakes up with his palm burning invisible scarlet, with the weight of power beneath his skin, with his throat raw of  _ why, why, why— _

He wakes up remembering where he is. 

“Ah! You are awake, one named Loki!” says the blue man from the ship’s crew. 

He woke up remembering that he had fallen, then from falling, fell right onto a bypassing ship and has been presumably saved. Loki doesn’t remember too much of the initial meeting, he doesn’t even think he got their names, but considering that he spent so long asleep without so much of being moved, sold, or chucked, he thinks these people at least decently okay. Loki sits up, a bit dizzy with sleep still seeping, while the blue man (not Jotun, at least, which saves Loki from some grief) heads off to announce his return to the world of the awakened.

But Loki knows he cannot stay. 

No, absolutely not.

Because if Loki is alive, if he was so easily found, then who’s to say he won’t be dragged back to the wretchedness he had first jumped away from. No, Loki must go. 

He would rather die than return to Asgard.

_ They _ must not find him. 

So Loki lifts himself off from the table that has been his makeshift bed, feet unsteady from the prolonged disuse of his limbs, and looks for a way out. 

A fumble and minute later, Loki buckles himself in one of the escape pods that was just off to the side of him this whole time. In a brief moment of gratitude to the Norns, Loki quickly figures out the labeling of the controls and the proper button sequence to start the pod and by the time to doors latch shut, the blue man had returned and stood dumbfounded as Loki extracts from the main ship. Loki flashes him a smile before speeding off into deep space. 

_ No hard feelings _ . 

Later, when Loki deems far far away, he lets the pod hover and, for once, he thinks. 

“Oh Norns,” he sighs. “What a mess your life has become.” 

A plan, he must think of a plan. With a plan, he can keep going. Go…but just where too? He can’t very well go back to anywhere in the nine realms, he might as well just hand himself back to Odin on a silver platter if he does. No, he must go somewhere, a place where even Heimdall will have trouble looking, a place far far away, a place someone will never think to look for a runaway exiled prince. But where is there such a place? 

Nowhere, perhaps, Loki laments, maybe there’s nowhere—

Wait.

Loki laughs. 

“Of course.” He takes the steering, setting course with such a place in mind. With one last press of a button, Loki flies to his next destination.

To Knowhere it is.

* * *

 

IT’S HERE, THERE, OR KNOWHERE

* * *

 

“You’d think we’d learn the first time,” grumbles Rocket as Peter was once again voted to drag the unconscious hunk from their windshield. “We really gotta stop taking in strays. Wanna bet what this next one will steal?” 

Groot doesn’t even look up from his game console when he response. Rocket laughs, 

“Yeah, wouldn’t  _ that _ be a riot.” 

“Rocket,” Gamora warns. 

“What? Groot’s the one who said it.” 

Gamora takes none of it and replies, “And you’re the one encouraging it. Now shut up before I make you go help.” 

Rocket rolls his eyes. “Like Quill doesn’t need the exercise.” 

“ _ Rocket. Out. _ ” 

-

This one’s quicker to wake up. 

Mantis almost hugs herself from the distress. She blinks back the wetness in her eyes, still remembering the same grief and brokenness this one and Loki had both shared. Yet this one held an anger, a vivid hate for someone that Mantis cannot fathom, but by his emotions, Mantis shares his hatred. By the commotion of the new awaken stranger, Mantis is able to find herself in the back of it with echoes of that ferocity still stinging underneath her skin. She doesn’t realize she is digging her nails into her hands until a hand smooths herself between her shoulders and she gasps and calms instantly. 

“You okay?” Gamora asks, still rubbing her hand over Mantis’ back. 

Mantis nods, her eyes now drying. 

The man calms down. His name is Thor. And Thor explains his tragedy. By the end of it, Mantis gets the name of who that vicious hate is directed to. 

Thanos. 

Instead of fear that Mantis would otherwise feel, it’s her own anger. 

-

The room is left quiet by Thor’s words.

These people, whatever they call themselves, are good people, Thor decides, and he is glad to have met them. But he cannot stay. Thanos is still out there heading for the rest of the infinity stones and Thor is weaponless and powerless to stop him. 

He stands. The one named Peter Quill puts his hands up to him, looking as if he was trying not to step back from Thor’s intimidating figure, which Thor couldn’t help but chuckle to.

“Woah, woah, woah, buddy,” Peter Quill says, “Where’re you going?” 

“I must go,” Thor said, stepping around and past him. He looks around their ship, peeking through all the crowded junk. “Do you have another vessel on this ship?” 

“Go?” Peter Quill squawks. The animal companion laughs. Thor opens a fridge and rummages through it, adjusting the blanket as he takes a couple packets that look good. “Hey—wait, that’s our food!” 

Thor pays no heed. 

“Thanos is still out there, just as you said,” He nods to Gamora, “he will stop at nothing until he collects all the stones. I must go to Nidavellir, it’s the only way to stop him.”

“You’re making that word up!” speaks up the one named Drax.

“I thought that place was a myth!” speaks up the animal companion.

“All words are made up,” Thor said. “And no, it is very real. I am also taking this pod.” 

He busies himself trying to unlock the pad accessing the pod. As he does, he hears the animal companion—Rabbit, Thor quickly deems—crackles something about being robbed twice. Thor pauses. 

“Twice?” He finds himself asking. 

Rabbit shoots him a grin, all sharp teeth. Thor thinks he’ll like him very much. 

“Yeah,  _ twice _ ,” he looks back to the rest of his group, still grinning, and continues, “ya ain’t the only one this week. These bozos picked up this one guy, smacked right up against our windshield too, and stole our other pod. Not a thank you in sight.”

Peter groans. “Don’t remind me of him.” 

“Quill here’s still a bit sore about it.”

“Hey!”

Hm, how curious. Nonetheless, Thor shrugs and continues attempting to figure out the passcode. 

“You have quite the bad luck,” he said. He can hear the two arguing about how he hadn’t been the one to let him in. Or well how he should’ve done something you dumb—

A hand touches his arm, Thor tenses. It’s the pinker being, the one who had woken him up. 

“You said Thanos killed your brother,” she says. 

He had. His hands tightens around his blanket at her mention. 

“And what of it?” He asks harder than he means to.

It doesn’t defer her. “Tell me about him.”

“What is there to tell?” He doesn’t like how broken his voice sounds. He can’t, he  _ shouldn’t _ think of him. What keeps him running is his anger, that’s what pushing him is to kill Thanos, but by her words, he thinks of his brother. For some reason, she looks as stricken as he is. So Thor relents. 

“I loved him…” he says, thick in his own throat, “I loved him yet even then, I lost him.”

“Mantis—!” Mantis unlocks the pod herself and steps away. Even Thor looks dumbstruck at her actions. The pod lays open. 

“We want to help you,” she says, “to defeat Thanos.” As she said that, the rest of her group stood and shared glances. Gamora was the first to step forward, then Peter, Rabbit, Drax, and the little Groot. 

Thor smiles. “Consider that help wanted.” 

**Author's Note:**

> I meant to post this series last year and then school hit me like a train. anyways go ham


End file.
